Carl Jung: The Black Books Seven-Volume Set
Carl Jung “The Black Books” 7-Volume Set
Carl Jung: The Black Books – Quotations
Volume 1: A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. It is clear that Dante found this point and those who have read Zarathustra will know that Nietzsche also discovered it. When this turning point comes people meet it in several ways: some turn away from it; others plunge into it; and something important happens to yet others from the outside. If we do not see a thing Fate does it to us. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 11
What of Jung’s fantasies did he regard as precognitive?
It is important to note that there were around twelve separate events:
1-2. October 1913: Repeated vision of flood and death of thousands, and the voice that said that this will become real.
- Vision of the sea of blood covering the northern lands.
- December 12, 1913: Image of a dead hero.
- December 15, 1913: Slaying Siegfried in a dream.
- December 25, 1913: Image of the foot of a giant stepping on a state, and images of murder and bloody cruelty.
- January 2, 1914: Image of a sea of blood and enormous dying.
- January 22, 1914: His soul comes up from the depths and asks him if he will accept war and destruction. She shows him images of destruction, military weapons, human remains, sunken ships, destroyed states, and so forth.
- May 21, 1914: He hears a voice saying that the sacrificed fall left and right.
10-12. June-July 1914: Dream (repeated three times) of being in a foreign land and having to return quickly by ship, and the descent of the icy cold. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 38-39
I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness. Then my desire for the increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me and horror came over me. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 11
The paintings from 1916 onward in the Red Book relate to Jung’s continued explorations in the later Black Books. Liber Novus and the Black Books are thus closely intertwined. The Black Books cover the period before, during, and after Liber Novus. ~ The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 12
Jung’s continued explorations of the visionary imagination in the Black Books from 1916 chart his evolving understanding and demonstrate how he sought to develop and extend the insights he had gained and embody them in life. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 12
His [Jung] retreat from the Burgholzli coincided with a shift in his research interests to the study of mythology, folklore, and religion, and he assembled a vast private library of scholarly works. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 13
He [Jung] found the mythological work exciting and intoxicating. “It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making,” he recalled in 1925. “I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or a Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 13
… Jung noted that the work [CW 5] was written in 1911, his thirty-sixth year: “The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 15
He [Jung] was conscious of the loss of his collaboration with Freud and was indebted to his wife [Emma] for her support. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 15
One without a myth “is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.” ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 15
The study of myth had revealed to Jung his mythlessness. He then undertook to get to know his myth, his “personal equation.” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 15
Jung used to say in later years that his tormenting doubts as to his own sanity should have been allayed by the amount of success he was having at the same time in the outer world especially in America” ~Barbara Hannah, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 19, fn 26
Permitting fantasy in myself had the same effect as would be produced on a man if he came into his workshop and found all the tools flying about doing things independently of his will. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 20
On September 20, 1910, at the age of twenty-three, Toni Wolff was brought by her mother to see Jung According to her sister Erna, he had successfully treated the son of a friend of her mother’s, who consequently recommended Jung. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 27-28
In November 1912, Jung returned from his New York lectures. In a diary entry of December 29, 1924, Toni Wolff noted that twelve years before, on Jung’s return from America, she went to him and “spoke of relationship.” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 29
In the November 15, 1913, entry in Book 2, following his account of the dream around December 1912 of the dove that transformed itself into a small girl and then back into the dove, Jung noted, “My decision was made. I had to give all my faith and trust to this woman [Toni].” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 29
In March 1913 he went to America again for five weeks. Decades later, Toni Wolff noted in her diary, “The feeling is somehow similar to 1913, when C[arl] went to America and we separated-and yet we couldn’t do it afterward.” This suggests a separation may have taken place at this time. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 29-30
Years later, Jung spoke to Aniela Jaffe concerning the relationship with Toni Wolff He said that he was faced with the problem of what to do with her after her analysis, which he said he had ended, despite feeling involved with her. A year later, he dreamed that they were together in the Alps in a valley of rocks, and that he heard elves singing, and that she was disappearing into a mountain, which filled him with dread. After this, he wrote to her.
He noted that after this dream, he knew that a relationship with her was unavoidable, and that his life was in danger. On a later occasion, while swimming, he found himself with a cramp and vowed that if it went away and he survived, he would give in to the relationship. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 30
In a diary entry of March 4, 1944, Toni Wolff referred to “31 years of relationship and 34 years of acquaintance.” This confirms that her relationship with Jung began sometime in 1913. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 30
At the beginning of her analysis T.W. had the most incredible fantasies, a whole eruption of the wildest fantasies , some even of cosmic nature. But at that point I was so preoccupied with my own material that I was scarcely able to take on hers. But her fantasies entered exactly into my line of thought. ~Aniela Jaffe, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 30
On April 26, 1936, Wolff noted in her diary: “I still transfer father symbols onto C.[Jung] That is why I am never entirely with myself and am no counter-weight to him” (Toni Wolff, Diary’ J, p. 101). ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 30, fn 86
Concerning her attraction to Jung, toward the end of her life Toni Wolff recalled that she had her first transference to Friedrich Schiller, in 1905, then to Goethe, and then to Jung, as a “productive genius.” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 30
When C[arl] begins to participate with my psychic material perhaps I have got what I need- the nurturing and supporting substance? I suspect myself of having insufficient confidence in him, because my analysis back then was intermingled with his problems- although it was also good for me. ~Toni Wolff, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 31
At the inception of their relationship, Toni Wolff was not interested in marriage and having children. She was critical of what she had observed of marriage: it seemed to make men less active and less enterprising- merely content with being fathers. It made both men and women less interested in culture. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 31
After having children, women often didn’t need their husbands, and their own problems tended to return. Her mother hadn’t learned to work and had consequently plagued her children with unused libido. Toni Wolff was also critical of the bondage of marriage. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 31
- W. was experiencing a similar stream of images. I had evidently infected her, or was the declencheur [trigger] that stirred up her imagination. My phantasies and hers were in a participation mystique. It was like a common stream, and a common task. Gradually I became conscious and gradually I became the center; and in the measure to which I attained these insights, she also found her center. But then she got stuck somewhere along the way, I remained too much the center that functioned for her. Therefore I was never permitted to be other than she wanted me to be, or than she needed to have me be. At that time she was entirely drawn into this terrible process in which I was involved, and she was just as helpless as I was. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 31-32
In letters dated September and October Jung wrote to Sabina 10, 1917, Spielrein commenting on the significance of certain hieroglyphs in a dream she had sent him, saying that “with your hieroglyphics we are dealing with phylogenetic engrams of an historical symbolic nature. Referring to the contempt meted out to Transformations and Symbols the Libido by the Freudians, he described himself as “clinging to his runes,” which he would not hand over to those who would not understand them. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 116
Referring to the contempt meted out to Transformations and Symbols of the Libido by the Freudians, he described himself as “clinging to his runes,” which he would not hand over to those who would not understand them. ~Sonu Shamdasani, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 116
In the autumn of 1917, Jung’s soul forces the black magician Ha to read and explain a series of cryptic runes that he had sent. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 115
In response to the request of Jung’s soul, Ha takes on the task of translating the runes, literally spelling them out. It is boot camp in Code City: he gives cues to Jung’s soul about how this or that shape corresponds to the sun, or a roof, or a tilted passageway, or even how one ought to feel physically while navigating this curve or that crevice. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 116
Much of your [Jung] material you said has come to you as runes & the explanation of those runes sounds like the veriest nonsense, but that does not matter if the end product is sense. ~Cary Baynes, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 116
A symbol in rune yoga is nearly the same as what it pictures, once it is understood as the mimicry of a right attitude on the levels of both spirit and instinct, both being archaically rooted. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 117
Ezra Pound’s Chinese ideograms connect with Jung’s runes only for a moment, across a wide, swift stream; Jung’s magic/ runic dialect has no home among the living. The magician’s black rod becomes Jung’s Hermes-wand-an aid in navigating the way of life redeemed from redeemers, or saved from salvation; the signs, unlike “the solid letter” in Holderlin’s “Patmos,” a poem long close to Jung’s heart, bring up their own dark ground with them. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 117
The text [Secret of the Golden Flower] gave me an undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the center. This was the first event which broke through my isolation. I became aware of an affinity; I could establish ties with someone and something. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 104
On May 25, 1929, he [Jung] wrote to Wilhelm: “Fate appears to have given us the role of two bridge pillars which carry the bridge between East and West. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 104
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